Downtown Brooklyn Skyscrapers Achieve Landmark Status

It’s no Financial District but, in addition to an ever-growing glut of luxury condos, Downtown Brooklyn does have a few very pretty, relatively tall buildings, a bunch of which have just been granted landmark status with the formation of the Borough Hall Skyscraper Historic District. Yesterday the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission confirmed the district (PDF), which the Timesnotes includes some 21 tall buildings, one of which fought the designation.

Tenants of stately 75 Livingston Street, one of the few residential buildings included in the new district, complained that the designation would mean all kinds of additional costs, laws and regulations. Most of the buildings covered, though, are either government or commercial offices.

The buildings, several of which were built in the neo-Gothic style, include the 13-story Beaux-Arts Temple Bar building, Brooklyn’s tallest building at the turn of the 20th century; the borough’s 1926 Municipal Building; and the building at 16 Court Street, a stepped-back tower that rises 36 stories above Brooklyn’s municipal plaza. […] The district also includes Brooklyn’s cupola-crowned Borough Hall, which was declared an individual landmark in 1966.

This marks Brooklyn’s second new landmarked district of the summer; back in July, the cluster of pre-Civil War wood frame homes on Vanderbilt Avenue in Fort Greene were gathered together in the Wallabout Historic District.